Suspense thriller Sookshmadarshini marks Nazriya’s return to Mollywood after a hiatus of four long years. Directed by MC Jithin and starring Basil Joseph as the male protagonist, the movie hit the big screens yesterday. Sookshmadarshini received glorious reviews from critics and is off to a good start at the box office.

In Kerala this Nazriya Nazim starrer collected in the vicinity of Rs. 1.6 crores gross, which can be termed as a promising start. The occupancies picked up in the evening and night shows once the reports started coming in. Even though the film had a limited release in the USA, it raked in over $30K on the opening day. The showcasing is expected to increase in this territory from today. Globally, the movie earned approximately Rs. 4 crores gross.

Riding on the terrific word of mouth, Sookshmardarshini commenced its day two with a bang. The movie is now selling around 7K tickets per hour on the BMS portal. Said to be made on a shoestring budget, the film has a high chance of emerging as a blockbuster. Sooskhmadarshini will have a solid weekend, but its performance on the first Monday will give us an idea about the final numbers.

Sookshmadarshini is bankrolled by cinematographers Shyju Khalid and Sameer Tahir, along with AV Anoop. The movie also stars Deepak Parambol, Sidharth Bharathan, Merin Philip, Akhila Bhargavan, Pooja Mohanraj, and others in pivotal roles. Christo Xavier composed the tunes.

There comes a moment in every animal lover’s life where we’re watching a movie with a cat in it, or a dog, or an [insert animal here], and we’re overwhelmed by one singular thought: “I swear to god, if anything happens to this creature, I will never watch a movie again.”

It’s an empty threat — probably — but in the moment nothing could be more sincere. Animals have a way of cutting through our emotional defenses. They can be jerks (my cats are literally punching each other right now) but they don’t screw each other over for money. They don’t pass legislation to deny people access to public bathrooms. In the movies, a human being is able to lose our sympathy completely, to the point that something bad happening to them feels like karmic justice. But a cat doesn’t deserve any of that crap. Ever. Ever.

So a film like “Flow” is about as harrowing as filmmaking gets, especially if you like cats. Or dogs. Or secretarybirds. Or lemurs. Or capybaras. The movie puts all these little guys in peril very quickly and never lets up. Even the quietest moments of “Flow” are tainted by existential threat. It’s suspenseful and pensive and painful in a way few films strive for, and fewer still achieve.

“Flow,” directed by Gints Zilbalodis (“Away”), tells the story of a cat who lives in the woods in a long-abandoned house. A pack of dogs, all domesticated breeds, roams these woods as well, chasing our little guy down because — well, they’re dogs. One day, all of a sudden, with almost no warning, a tidal wave crashes through the trees, and the danger won’t stop there. The water level is slowly rising, every second, until all the land starts to disappear under the rippling surface.

The only salvation is a small wooden sailboat. The cat leaps into it along with a lemur and a capybara, and they float aimlessly, foodlessly, atop the trees, over mountains, through the last sky-scraping vestiges of human civilization. The dogs come back, and the golden retriever — being a golden retriever — makes friends with everybody. A secretarybird takes pity on them and brings fish, and may even be able to protect them from other airborne predators. Whatever these animals’ differences may have been, even though they’re naturally predators and prey, even they can recognize that in the face of climate change the only way to survive is by working together. Humanity, much to our ongoing shame, would apparently never.

It’s not a subtle message, and any movie that relies entirely on placing animals in peril isn’t subtle either. Gints Zilbalodis doesn’t merely earn our sympathy with these creatures, he practically takes it from us at gunpoint. To be perfectly frank, “Flow” is in many ways a cinematic cheap shot. Sure, it’ll knock the wind out of you, but it’s not like we had any choice. Animals are cute. Animals in danger are an emotional nuclear strike.

Of course, nobody ever said movies have to be subtle. At least, nobody credible. But “Flow” does find subtlety in its little moments, as opposed to its big messages. The major plot points — daring rescues, unexpected alliances, spiritual moments that defy any literal interpretation — are heavy-handed, yet effective. The scenes of a cat, despite its harrowing circumstances, reduced to kittenhood by the allure of bopping a lemur’s swishing tail? Now that’s relatable. That’s life going on, whether we realize it or not.

So where are the humans in “Flow?” Long gone by the time the movie begins, apparently. “Flow” floats through the remains of our society, empty towers to infinity, monuments reduced to aquatic tombs. Our conspicuous absence is depressing, but then again, if it weren’t for us, or at least whoever built the boat these animals are clinging to, there would be no hope for any animal’s salvation. Except of course for the fish. They seem to be having a field day. If they could speak you’d probably hear one of them yell “I’m king of the world!’ before getting munched on by, apparently, the world’s very last cat.

“Flow” is animated in a style that suggests that Gints Zilbalodis plays, and loves, a lot of video games. The simplistic character designs, the bright lighting, the environments filled with tall structures in the distance to keep us oriented. The nature of the world is revealed in action and detail. Its immensity is contrasted with the smallness of the characters, highlighting a breathtaking sense of scale.

“Flow” uses platforming and puzzle-solving elements to push its story forward, and before long you might get a little impatient and wonder when we’re finally going to be allowed to play. We can’t, of course, because in this story humanity is dead. The story is in so many ways about persevering in the face of overwhelming helplessness. We may never get that “Shadow of the Colossus” movie Hollywood kept threatening to make for so long, but “Flow” understood many of the storytelling lessons that particular classic had to teach us.

Zilbalodis’s film makes a powerful double feature with this year’s “The Wild Robot,” which also tells a tale of a harrowing future in which animals have to set aside their instincts and band together to survive. Both films evoke religious imagery, although “The Wild Robot” is very much The New Testament and “Flow” is basically “Noah’s Skiff.” On the surface it may be tempting to suggest that “The Wild Robot,” being the Hollywood studio version, is the less subtle of the two, but that film has complex philosophical conversations that “Flow” can only hint at, and the commitment “Flow” has to imperiling small animals amidst a climate change allegory is anything but understated. The two films make similar points in incredibly different ways; both do a beautiful job of it.

Getting back to my earlier threat that if anything happens to the cat I’ll never watch a movie again — I can’t say everything turns out OK. Because it kind of can’t, and that’s the point. The animals in “Flow” aren’t in control of their circumstances, and it’ll be a miracle if anything — except of course for (most of) the fish — survives this aquatic apocalypse. And if they do, who knows for how long? Then again “Flow” is itself a bit of a miracle, so maybe there’s hope. If not for us, then at least for the innocent creatures who have to live in the crappy world we’ve made for them.

So if anything does happen to this cat, or this dog, or this secretarybird, or this lemur, or this capybara … we have only ourselves to blame.

The documentary “The Last Republican” follows the final months in office of Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who represented two districts in Illinois over the span of 12 years. Kinzinger was one of a handful of Republicans who stood against President Donald Trump, refusing to support him in 2016, then going after him more straightforwardly after Trump lost the election of 2020 and tried to overturn the results by inciting a mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, causing multiple deaths. Unlike other Republicans, including then-Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and then-Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy, Kinzinger never walked back or even softened his position on Trump’s role in Jan. 6 in order to help position Trump for re-election and stay close to the party’s power center. Kinzinger instead made his opposition to Trump the defining part of his identity.

He started a podcast titled “Country First Conversations”” and a political action committee to fund anti-Trump candidates and later supported President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris for president and spoke at the Democratic convention. After voting against Trump’s first impeachment, Kinzinger voted for his second impeachment and later said he regretted not voting for the first one.

He also became one of 35 Republicans to support the formation of a committee to investigate the attacks on the Capitol and served on the committee himself. There’s grimly funny segment showing House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, announcing that Kinzinger was going to serve on the Jan. 6 committee before actually asking him, and a snippet of McCarthy casually referring to Kinzinger and another Trump critic, Wyoming Republican senator Liz Cheney, as “Pelosi Republicans.” When Cheney lost her primary in Wyoming to her former advisor Harriet Hageman—who briefly opposed Trump, then supported him again—Kinzinger accused conservative pastors of “failing their congregations” by encouraging support for Trump. He is now a CNN commentator.

The title telegraphs the point-of-view of the movie’s director, Steve Pink (“Gross Pointe Blank”). Pink is progressive who disagrees with most of what Kinzinger stands for politically (the movie opens with Kinzinger baiting Pink by calling him a “communist”). Pink positions Kinzinger as one of the last true or real Republicans, primarily because Kinzinger consistently advocated for the rule of law where Trump was concerned and, in Kinzinger’s words, put “country over party.”

This is, of course, a questionable framing, good for branding and sparking arguments on podcasts but not much else. There are plenty other examples of Republicans positioning themselves above the law at various points in the last 50 years, and it’s not as if Democrats have a spotless record in that regard either. In any given era of American history, the “true” Republicans are whichever ones define the identity of the party, and at this particular juncture, it’s not people like Kinzinger.

“The Last Republican” also mostly elides Kinzinger’s positions on various issues, seemingly to make him more palatable here as a Capra-esque hero who is exclusively defined by standing up to corruption, and against a politician that the filmmaker also opposes. (Kinzinger had a much more progressive record on anti-discrimination legislation than most Republicans, but still voted with Trump 90% of the time, blamed China for spreading COVID, and voted in 2017 to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act.)

This is not to say that Kinzinger’s opposition to Trump isn’t evidence of integrity and a willingness to sacrifice power for principle. That’s plainly the case, and it’s driven home in a scene where Kinzinger and his wife Sofia Boza-Holman sit on a couch in their house cradling their newborn son while watching the House vote to censure Kinzinger and Cheney for serving on the Jan. 6 committee. But there’s a more nuanced movie that could’ve been made covering the same period in Kinzinger’s life, one that took fuller measure of the ancient proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”—though, to be fair, the very end of the movie humorously acknowledges what strange allies Pink and Kinzinger are, at least as far as this project is concerned.

The movie also gives a strong sense of Kinzinger as a person walking against the winds of change and dealing with tendencies in the American character that elude party definitions. “Everybody’s self-centered,” he tells Pink. “That’s the fight now of my next part of life, fighting against that cynicism.”